QGIS Planet

One of the cool things I love about QGIS is finding stuff that you didn’t know it could do, well not just itself but plugins that you didn’t know about.

Today my discovery was in how to generate contour lines from a point layer.

First install the contour plugin for qgis via the plugin installer. Just search for “contour”

Once installed open a vector point layer in QGIS. Make sure the point layer has a field that you can use for elevation.

One I prepared earlier

Then select from the menu: Plugins->Contour->Contour

Fill in the information

Details form (The above setting will generate 0.5m contours)

Press OK

Results

Results from plugin

Profit??

The resulting contours will have a field that contains the label and z value for each contour line, you can then just label or color them how you wish.

Note: There is a bug with QGIS memory layers where the fields don’t show up in dropdown or attribute browsers, a simple fix is just to make the layer editable and then non editable then the fields will be there.

The contour layer is a QGIS memory layer so remember to save it to disk eg a shapefile before you close you will loose your new fancy contour layer.